the paper had entrusted to me. Despite our attempts at discretion, Mithra-
Grandchamp’s name had made the rounds of the newspaper. Rumor had
turned him into a mythic beast, and everyone was determined to bet on him.
All we could do was watch the race and hope. . . . At the last turn, Mithra-
Grandchamp began to pull away. Entering the final stretch, he had a lead of
five lengths, and we watched in a dream as he crossed the finish line a good
forty yards ahead of his closest pursuer. Back at the paper, they must have
been going wild around the TV screen. (91–92)In this passage, the jarring sentence is “At Vincennes we lingered so long
in the dining room that the race came and went without us.” And again a big
part of the problem is that the implied author chooses to have the narrating-I
mention something of major consequence within the developing purposive
design, something that calls for substantial additional commentary, but then
has the narrating-I simply move on. Again, imagining that the narrative is
fictional helps clarify the readerly response. In that case, I’d hypothesize that
the sentence is an instance of underreporting, one deliberately creating ethi-
cal distance between implied author and character narrator and inviting the
audience to wonder what exactly happened in the dining room populated
by those shady characters. We might even expect that the implied author
would eventually supply that explanation. But the frame of nonfiction and
the larger context work against the conclusion that the implied Bauby is
using the sentence to create distance from the narrating-I. Furthermore, the
implied Bauby ends the chapter with a strong signal that his narrative will
not return to what happened in the dining room:
Frankly, I had forgotten Mithra-Grandchamp. The memory of that event has
only just come back to me, now doubly painful: regret for a vanished past
and, above all, remorse for lost opportunities. Mithra-Grandchamp is the
women we were unable to love, the chances we failed to seize, the moments
of happiness we allowed to drift away. Today it seems to me that my whole
life was nothing but a string of those small near misses: races whose result
we know beforehand but in which we fail to bet on the winner. By the way,
we managed to pay back all our colleagues. (94)This passage reveals that the implied Bauby’s main purpose in the chapter
is to thematize the dramatic narrative of the missed opportunity, to make it
the emblem of a life filled with near misses. Given that purpose, we might try
to justify the lack of explanation by noting that the event of failing to get to the
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